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A La Carte (12/20)

December 20, 2010

Yesterday evening our church was able to enjoy a baptism service and see 3 people make that public profession of faith. What an awesome thing God has done in giving us baptism, a visible rite that speaks so clearly about the inner change he has wrought.

The Half-Life of Celebrity - “Is it possible to study something as ill-defined as culture in a quantitative manner? Researchers from Harvard have collaborated with Google and some traditional publishers to answer that question with a qualified ‘yes.’ By leveraging a portion of Google’s massive library of digitized books, the team has created what they call a ‘culturome,’ with which they can track the use of language and terms across hundreds of years.”

I Looked For Love in Your Eyes - In case you missed it on Saturday, you should check out this poem a reader of the site shared with me. Almost 20,000 people read it this weekend.

TV and Teen Girls - This is pretty obvious but still worth thinking about that next time you sit down to watch some television. “According to a new study conducted by the Parents Television Council (PTC), Hollywood is shockingly obsessed with sexualizing teen girls, to the point where underage female characters are shown participating in an even higher percentage of sexual situations than their adult counterparts: 47 percent to 29 percent respectively.”

The Woman Without Fear - I found this a rather interesting article. “SM is a woman without fear. She doesn’t feel it. She has been held at knifepoint without a tinge of panic. She’ll happily handle live snakes and spiders, even though she claims not to like them. She can sit through reels of upsetting footage without a single start. And all because a pair of almond-shaped structures in her brain – amygdalae – have been destroyed.”

About Tim Challies

I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario, and am a co-founder of Cruciform Press.